Lifting Starships

Hi all,

The statement from Loren leaves us with some serious problems.
There is a very serious problem with requiring that spacecraft rely
on lift in order to make a landing.

In the cited example, an airframe type ship comes down through an
atmosphere and happily lands on a planet using lift from the wings
to flare at touchdown.

When an unstreamlined ship attempts to do the same thing, OOPS no
wings:  no lift.  Crash and burn.

Question:  How then does our airframe, wing dependant ship, land
with no atmosphere?  Wings don't help when you have no air.  The
airframe ship will crash from a lack of lift just as the
unstreamlined ship did.

There MUST be downward pointing rockets on ships in order for them
to land in such circumstances.  As an unstreamlined ship will not
be able to use lift at ANY time, this will be the only normal way
the ship could land at ALL.

Barring specially fitted rockets, in order to maneuver properly, a
ship's rocket engines must be able to be gymbaled.  (You can't have
them pointing in one direction only all the time.)  It is true that
the amount that the engines must be deflected is limited, but with
contra-gravitic drives, you won't need much deflection at all.
>From my reading of the paragraph outtake from FF&S, the contragrav
takes care of 99% of the weight.  So, you need a 1/100th of a G
vector from your engines in order to get a full G upward to equal
your weight and a bit more to take off.  Well, if you have 1 G
engines, the necessary deflection is Less than one degree.

A 1 degree deflection gives you a net thrust of .0075 G's upward.
Just barely enough.  Fear not, a deflection of 6.3 degrees will
give you a full net thrust of 0.1 G in an upward direction.  This
is a negigable defection and plenty of thrust for landing.

The main difficulty in landing an unstreamlined ship in a real
atmosphere will be avoiding the structual limitations on the ship.
As we have seen in the case of the streamlined ship, we can not
exceed the 1000kph limit on the structure.  In the case of an
unstreamlined ship, the limit is 300kph.  This is a VERY low speed
for you to try to enter the atmosphere at.  One would have to come
to almost zero ground speed for a ship to enter the upper
atmosphere.  You would have to have some pretty good meteorological
data to avoid winds of 300kph on re-entry.  Doing so, even with
good data, and a ground side weather station at the starport should
be pretty dang close to impossible.
- --
Scott 2G Kellogg
"Scotty!
 Tell me!
 What should I do?
 Should I get up and eat breakfast,
 Or lie here with you?"   -- Dr. Britta "Seuss" Damwitz,
                             _Rhymes for people who can barely walk_